Stairlift to Heaven

by Terry Ravenscroft

  After three more exchanges of correspondence, by which time I had decided I’d led Air 2000 up the garden path for long enough, it occurred to me that two other incidents worthy of complaint had occurred during my flight; one was that from my window seat I couldn’t see the television set located in the central aisle without leaning over to a degree well in excess of the lean on the Tower of Pisa if I were to view the screen in full; the other was that I was ripped off to the tune of about twenty-five per cent when changing my Spanish pesetas back into sterling. I saw a book looming.

  Rather than write to Air 2000 again, who no doubt would have had enough of me by then, I complained to two other airline companies. Their replies and the subsequent correspondence encouraged me to write to other airline companies, but this time with complaints I had made up. There are only so many things one can complain about, even to airlines, so I also wrote to some of them in praise of their service and to others with requests for advice. A book, which I called Dear Air 2000 in honour of the first of my letters, was the result.

  Dear Air 2000 must have set a world record for being turned down because over the course of the next five years there wasn’t one publisher I sent it to who didn’t reject it. Not all of them turned it down out of hand; in fact some were quite complimentary about it. One went as far as to say “This is the funniest book I’ve read in ages. If you were Ben Elton I’d publish it tomorrow. But who is Terry Ravenscroft?’ (Publishers, along with most people I would guess, don’t read the credits at the end of television programmes or he might have known.)

  That’s the way things are in the book publishing industry I’m afraid, even more so now, in 2008 than it was back then. Publishers nowadays aren’t selling books, they’re selling names. There is no doubt that if Victoria Beckham were to announce she was planning a book called ‘The Thoughts of Victoria Beckham’ publishers would be falling over their cheque books in the rush to offer her a million pounds advance. That ‘The Thoughts of Victoria Beckham’ would be an exceptionally thin book containing just one chapter entitled ‘Shopping’ wouldn’t affect their interest in it in the slightest. ‘Kylie Minogue’s Road Kill Recipes’ would be welcomed with open arms.

  Eventually I gave up the ghost and published Dear Air 2000 myself, a relatively inexpensive and easy matter nowadays with ‘print on demand’ technology. But publishing it, I was soon to discover, was the easy part. Trying to sell it was a different matter entirely. Amazon stocked it (they stock nearly all published books, bless them), but W H Smiths, Waterstone’s and Borders didn’t want to know, possibly applying the ‘Ben Elton who is Terry Ravenscroft’ principle’.

  To promote the book I sent a copy to eighty commercial radio presenters, asking them to read it and if they liked it to give it a mention on their show. I don’t know how many did but seven of them liked it enough to give me an on air interview. The book started to sell on Amazon.

  I was convinced it would sell in bookshops too, and because of its subject matter especially so in airline bookshops, if only I could get it on their shelves. I decided to find out for definite. I was going on holiday and arrived at Manchester Airport an hour earlier than I needed to. As soon as I’d checked in I discreetly placed five copies of Dear Air 2000 in a prominent position on the shelves of W H Smith’s air side bookshop and stood by to watch what would happen. After forty five minutes five people had picked up the book and glanced through it. Four of them had gone to the counter to buy it. They weren’t able to of course because the bar code wouldn’t scan. The first time this happened the assistant called for the manager. Heads were scratched and apologies made to the prospective customer. Telephone calls, presumably to head office, were made. In the meantime a second customer arrived at the counter wanting to buy the book. Money did eventually change hands and two satisfied customers departed with copies of Dear Air 2000. How the sales were accounted for I have no idea, nor did I care; I had made my point.

  It had been my intention to get in touch with W H Smith on my return from holiday to report what had happened, but on arriving home a letter was waiting for me. It was from publisher Michael O’Mara Books, from Michael O’Mara himself no less. He had come by a copy of Air 2000, he wanted to publish it himself, he would give me a substantial advance, was I interested? Does the Pope shit on Catholics? Dear Air 2000 was re-published as ‘Air Mail’ and sold in bookshops with a gratifying degree of success.

  I hadn’t the heart to tell Michael O’Mara that Michael O’Mara Books had turned the book down when I had offered it to them two years ago, along with all those other short-sighted publishers.

  ****

  March 16 2008. AN AMBITION FULFILLED.

  My front drive is fourteen feet wide, exactly the same width as the local canal at its narrowest point. Using the edges of my drive as a guide I had chalked lines across the pavement to represent the canal. Now I walked along the footpath for some twenty yards, turned, ran back at full pelt, hit the first chalk line, leapt, and landed about a foot beyond the second chalk line. I retraced my steps and did the same again, putting a little more effort into it. This time I cleared the second chalk line by a good two feet, a leap in excess of sixteen feet. I then jumped across the lines in the reverse direction, with the same result. It was then that Atkins happened by, on his way to buy his morning newspaper.

  Don't tell me,” he said “you asked The Trouble to dress up as a schoolgirl and she told you to take a running jump.”

  He wasn't far off the mark as far as The Trouble telling me to take a running jump was concerned as I was in the doghouse for telling her Feng Shui instructor to clear off when he called round to rearrange our furniture again and she wasn’t in. “I'm going to jump the canal,” I said.

  Atkins was impressed. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “When are you doing it? I want to be there,” he said eagerly, no doubt hoping the same disaster that befell him when he went goose-hunting would befall me. “I'll act as your second. Carry a dry set of clothing for you and a towel.”

  “There'll be no need for that,” I said, “It's a done job.”

  Jumping over the canal at its narrowest point (known to everyone as ‘the narrow hole’) has long been an ambition of mine. In fact I've wanted to do it since I was a boy. During my schooldays I was a fair athlete, I always won the hundred yards in my age group at the school sports and the long jump with it, and could jump over twenty feet when I was fifteen. Jumping over the canal should have presented no problem at all. But I never did it. I’ve jumped in it. And over the years I’ve walked by it, fell in it, paddled in it, peed in it (both while I was paddling in it and from the towpath), fished in it, skimmed stones on it, skated on it and made love on the grass verge which separates it from its towpath. But never jumped it.

  Lots of my schoolmates jumped it, nearly all of them, boys who couldn't jump anywhere near as far as I could. Two girls had even jumped it. The only casualty had been Bucktooth Dawson, and even he cleared it, the casualty being when his impetus on landing kept him running and he ran into a tree and knocked his front teeth out. (Disappointingly for him people still called him bucktooth. He pointed out that he now hadn't any teeth and therefore his nickname should now be Buck, which he would have enjoyed as he liked cowboy pictures, but nobody took any notice of course, children being children.

  I never did jump it. Something always stopped me. The fear of falling in and making a fool of myself I suppose, even though I knew I was more than capable of clearing it. But I never forgot it, and many times since I've sworn that one day I would do it. So today, at the age of sixty-seven, after satisfying myself that I could still easily jump the fourteen feet required, I set out to do it. I allowed Atkins to accompany me but spurned his offer of videoing the occasion for a potential 'You've Been Framed' clip.

  I didn't mess about when we got there, I just backed away from the water's edge as far as I could, ran, then soared over the canal like a gazelle, landing on the other side with a good three
feet to spare. Atkins was most impressed, and applauded, but failed to hide his disappointment.

  When my schoolmates had jumped it all those years ago it wasn't really a proposition to jump back as the land on the opposite side of the canal sloped away quite steeply and was composed largely of grass tussocks and the occasional cowpat, making a return jump much more difficult. So having leapt the canal the way back was down through the fields and return via the footbridge some hundred yards or so down the canal. Which is what I intended to do. Except that I now found out I couldn't. In front of me was not an open field but a housing estate, and my way was blocked by a ten feet high back garden fence.

  I pointed out my predicament to Atkins. “Just climb over the fence,” he called.

  “You must be joking.”

  “You'll have to jump back over the canal then.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “You'll have to stay there and starve to death then.”

  This is where my National Service survival training came in. “There are some planks in my garage. Nip back and get a couple of them to make a bridge over the canal.”

  Atkins nodded. “It's as good as done.” Good old Atkins, I thought, a friend in need.

  Four hours I waited there. He eventually returned just before dark, two planks over his shoulder. Naturally by then I was fuming. “What the bloody hell kept you?” I demanded.

  “Sorry. Your garage was locked and when I asked The Trouble for the key she wanted to know what I wanted it for and I told her and she told me to clear off and to tell you what it feels like to be told to clear off like you told her Feng Shui instructor to clear off. Anyway I haven't got any planks and I don't know anybody who has so I had to buy a couple, you owe me fifteen quid.”

  No, I didn't fall into the canal when I crossed the planks, thank you for asking, although by then I couldn't have cared less if I had.

  ****

  May 2 2008. SWIMMING LESSONS.

  A few weeks ago The Trouble indicated something in the freebie newspaper that had caught her eye. “Have you read this?” she said. “It’s just what you need.”

  I looked to where she was pointing. “Incontinence pants? My trouble is not being able to pee, not peeing too much.”

  “Not that! Underneath.” She read it out. Apparently the local leisure centre would be holding free swimming lessons specially designed for Oldies. She suggested again that I might take advantage of the offer.

  “Why?” I asked. “I’ve got by for the best part of seventy years without knowing how to swim, I’m sure I can manage a bit longer.”

  “People who do as much walking along the canal as you do should be able to swim,” The Trouble argued. “What if you were to fall in?”

  “I’ve managed to avoid falling in up until now.”

  “You had a narrow escape not long back And you’re getting older . What if you had a dizzy spell?”

  “I don’t have dizzy spells.”

  “Not yet. But you might start getting them.”

  I thought about it. Maybe there was something in what The Trouble was saying. Maybe I might start getting the odd dizzy spell now I’m well into my sixties, I’ve heard of other people my age who have started having them. I decided to go for it, as they say nowadays, and a couple of weeks later found me presenting myself at the swimming pool at the appointed hour of 9 a.m. Apparently there would be twenty lessons in all, one every Monday morning. I would very soon be Ian Thorpe.

  There were twelve would-be swimmers in total, all male, the powers-that-be having deemed that any prospective Oldie women swimmers would be accommodated in another session, possibly on the grounds that the swimming lessons would go more swimmingly if any scope for hanky-panky had been eliminated.

  Of the twelve of us one man has only one leg, one must weigh thirty stones if he weighs an ounce, one is a dwarf, and one is a hunchback. The other eight of us could be classified as normal, although two of them can’t be a day under ninety and another has a glass eye, which strictly speaking is not completely normal, but a lot more normal than the four I’ve mentioned. Lined up we must have looked like we were auditioning for Star Wars 7, The Return of the Grotesques.

  I had grave doubts that when the fat one entered the pool he would displace such a volume of water that we’d all be swimming in the rafters but I kept my thoughts to myself, at least for the time being. But watch this space.

  “Have you all brought along your birth certificates?” the swimming instructor now asked.

  Well I hadn’t and nor had any of the others judging from their reactions.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” said the man with the glass eye.

  The instructor gave a long-suffering sigh. “How am I supposed to know if you are entitled to free swimming lessons if you haven’t brought along you birth certificate?”

  “How am I supposed to know you’re a swimming instructor?” the man with the glass eye, sharp as a tack, shot back at her,

  “Because I’ve got a whistle round my neck,” she said.

  I almost chipped in with “You could be the referee for the five-a-side football in the gym and you’ve turned up at the wrong venue,” but held back, mindful that she was a woman who would very soon have my life in her hands.

  “I sincerely hope you’ve all brought swimwear?” the instructor asked, our inability to have brought our birth certificates obviously prompting the enquiry. “If not you can hire one,” she added.

  One of we normal ones raised a hand and said, a little embarrassed, “Where can you hire them?”

  The hunchback, demonstrating a ready sense of humour despite his affliction, said, “There’s a little press stud on the waistband, you just push it and up they go.” I’d have been proud of that one myself.

  After we’d all got kitted out the lesson began. First we had to lie flat on our bellies and do the breast stroke, as demonstrated by the lady instructor. This involved moving our arms and legs, or in the case of the one-legged man his arms and leg, in a sort of frog-like motion. After a minute or so the one-legged man asked, reasonably enough, if, once he was in the pool, his being minus a leg might cause him to go round in circles rather than in a straight line. The instructor said she hadn’t come across this potential problem before but that they would “cross that bridge when they came to it.”

  A bridge that needed to be crossed immediately, as we’d already come to it, was that the fat man, balancing somewhat precariously on his belly, kept toppling over every time he made more than the smallest frog-like motion with his arms and legs, and on a couple of occasions would have squashed the man with the glass eye and maybe caused his glass eye to pop out if the latter hadn’t had the good sense to fling himself out of the fat man’s path. The instructor solved this hitch in proceedings by moving the fat man over against a wall, which stopped him toppling over on that side, and by shoring up his other side with the aid two medicine balls borrowed from the fitness centre.

  The hunchback, demonstrating his sense of humour again, said he was thankful we weren’t doing the back stroke or he’d be in the same boat and would also require shoring up. His mention of boats got me thinking that if you wished to propel yourself through water then a boat would be a far easier and safer way of achieving this rather than by swimming; certainly a less tiring way, as after about five minutes of lying on my belly and moving my arms and legs in frog-like motions I was absolutely knackered. I mentioned this to the instructor who said that once we were in the pool it wouldn’t be so tiring due to the buoyancy of the water. Fortunately we were then asked to get in the pool to test out this theory.

  At this point the fat man excused himself as he ‘wanted the lavatory’. I hazarded a guess that it would be doubtful if the lavatory would feel the same way about him once he’d deposited his thirty stones on it.

  There were stone steps down into the pool, which is three feet six inches deep at the shallow end. When we walked down the steps the dwarf, at three feet at the most,
disappeared completely under water before bobbing to the surface again and splashing for dear life in a furious mixture of the front crawl, backstroke, butterfly and dog paddle. The instructor, obviously never having had to instruct a three foot dwarf trying to stand up in a three feet six deep pool before, told him to get out while she had a think about it.

  The fat fuck returned from the gents - the reader will see why I have relegated him from a fat man to a fat fuck in a moment - and eschewing the steps, and quite without warning, jumped into the pool. A wave of tsunami proportions headed for me at about two hundred miles-an-hour, completely engulfing me and filling my eyes with the heavily-chlorinated water. Minutes later my eyes were red raw from a combination of the effects of the chlorine and from rubbing them, and several hours later I still looked like something out of a Hammer horror film. The Trouble couldn’t look at me without her eyes watering.

  The following Monday, more than a little dubious about continuing after what had happened the week before, but having taken the precaution of equipping myself with a pair of goggles should the fat fuck Mr Liddiard take it upon himself to jump in the pool again, I went for my second lesson. I was glad I did because it went a lot more successfully for me than had the first. The same can’t be said for one of my fellow learner swimmers, the dwarf, Mr Leeson, for reasons which I will now disclose.

  One of the teaching techniques employed by the swimming instructor, Miss Hobday, is to have the learner swimmers stand in the shallow end of the pool, squat down a little so that their shoulders are level with the top of the water, and practice the arm movements of the breast stroke whilst walking along the bottom. This, she assured us, would give us the feel of actually swimming in addition to building up our confidence.